Thursday, October 15, 2009

All Things Are Light -
Linus Pauling Quartet (#3, 2007)

“Sometimes I drink for taste, but
Mostly just to get wasted.” - 40 Oz.


"Alien Abduction" from All Things Are Light (2007)

Most drunkenest LP4 record - ever! “Southern Pine” sounds like a lazy campsite drinkin’ song. “She Bad, She Thowed” is a barfight (at the dearly-departed Proletariat). “Old Crow” and “40 Oz.” are self-explanatory, and “Enchirito” is a booze-fueled fast-food run. Pretty sure there’s a mead hall somewhere in “Waiting for the Axe to Fall.” (Usually, Linus is all about the bonghits...) This is one of the greatest local releases in many a spin around the sun!

It all kicks off with “Alien Abduction” [above], which crams the non-drunk Linus Pauling experience into a three-part epic: (i) stoner-fuzz psych, (2) jazzy space-jam, (3) interstellar pedal-to-the-metal rawk. You can get your very own freeware of this track at label Camera Obscura's MP3 Club, along with other worthy free stuff. Excellent lead-off track, and a real outer-orbit killer live as well.

Ramon takes a ride.
“Southern Pine” starts mellow, almost droning shoegaze-wise, but eventually it too breaks free into ballistic rifftasm. Finally, the band takes it to that next level where O yeah! and Alright! are all that can be said. “She Bad, She Thowed” is a hard-choogling true story of a hard-fighting lady, with local rap lingo appropriated for the title. And “Old Crow” uses the classic Houston gambit of combining the heaviest riffs with lighter drumming, like pre-Sabbath doom.



The oddball “40 Oz.” finds Linus in a sweet and folky mood, harmonizing (not as scary as it might seem) about being a cheap drunk. “Enchirito” takes La Tapatia to processed-food hell, via Stooges punk-n-saxophone stylings. Faster than a race to the toilet! And how else do you top off such a mountain of riffs and majesty? With a sword metal epic, of course! “Waiting for the Axe to Fall” is like if a Boris Vallejo painting and a Frank Frazetta painting had a baby... who rocked out mercilessly. Thus the video.




Just a note on “HAWG!” -
"In December the band releases an extremely limited 13 copy as part of the Grey Ghost series - HAWG! Grey Ghost #48 - an 11-minute two-chord lecherous pill-popping dying-in-a-hail-of-bullets complete-with-Otis-Redding-Rave-up biker-epic. It sells out on the first day."
You can hear it all on their MySpace page, and that's what pushes All Things Are Light to the coveted #3 slot of the Top 10 of 2007!


What else? There's an occasional blog. And here are some reviews of All Things Are Light: Ptolemaic Terrascope, Foxy Digitalis, and... All Music Guide!


All Things Are Light
Official - worshipguitars.org/LP4/
Myspace - myspace.com/linuspaulingquartet
Purchase - Saki Store
iTunes - All Things Are Light

Genre - Heavy-Duty Space-Psych
Review - Aural Innovations

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